My unexpected encounter with a Sony Engineer

A few weeks ago I was invited to a good friend’s wedding here in Tokyo.

One of the other invitees happened to have studied at the same engineering school as me in France, and we kind of knew each other from these “good ol’ days”. So the groom had decided to sit us at the same table.

We started chit-chatting. “Do you still work for MegaCorp XYZ?”, I asked. “No, he replied, I’ve been working as an engineer for Sony for the past 5 years actually”.

We started discussing what games he was working on. (I’m not going to mention the games here, because I think this could give out too much about that specific person, so I’ll just say he’s been working on some big AAA Title for the PS4.)

Then, out of the blue, he said, with kind of a snarky smile:

“I know you’re the guy behind that hacking site, wololo.net”

That made me uncomfortable. I don’t think I’ve actually ever met someone from Sony in real life, who knew I was into hacking their ***. Having worked for a decade in Tokyo in the IT industry, I’ve worked with many people who have been Sony employees, but I don’t think any of them knew, or cared, about this tiny hacking blog.

I think making me uncomfortable for a minute was the effect he was looking for. Then he relaxed, and told me:

“You know, there’s Sony’s official stance as a company, and there’s what we think on the engineering side. It’s pretty well known internally that our SDKs are quite terrible, so we’re always amazed at what some of you guys were able to do on the PSP with made-from-scratch SDKs. Sometimes, we’d read these hacking websites and be like: ‘how did they do that? That’s really awesome!”

I guess it makes sense, and in a way I’ve always assumed this is how it works. Sony as a company needs to protect its business, but I’m convinced that some of their tech employees are as fascinated as I am with the work of hackers. Who can be an engineer and not be excited by the art of people who manage to get devices do something people never imagined they would?

In an awkward way, I’m not sure why, but I concluded the conversation with “oh, well, you know, I was super into it back in the PSP days, but now I only follow this kind of thing distantly”. Not sure why I said that. Maybe because as a grown up with a grown up life, it feels weird to admit I’m still 200% excited by console homebrew? Well, if he or his colleagues read this article at some point, now you know 🙂

We quickly stopped discussing. It was a wedding, and our wives were getting annoyed at the two geeks chatting about PS4 games and stuff.

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wololo

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That’s amazing i’m glad you guys got to enjoy your little chat but honestly i wouldn’t let it bother you if he knew you were behind wololo.net, as long as you’re not working on anything that promotes piracy i think it should be 100% fine to talk about like it’s no big deal but hey that’s just me. hopefully you guys get to meet up again sometime in the future.

A few months ago i was working in the development for PS4 SLIM and PS4 PRO, becouse in the past i was make somethings for PSP to make that system free to install homebrews… The companys only search people whit special conditions to works him in security… Great Blog wololo!!

It’s nice to be noticed even when nobody mentioned anything. Remember hes your competitor no matter how you view it that’s just the types of people a corporation like sony look for in a individual. Stay in the direction of MR.ROBOT and remember how far you have come!

Hi Wololo, I would like to know if it could be posible that you tell us what was your engineering school in France ? I’m 18 and would like to become an computer engineer, I already know a lot of interresting schools but don’t know what they are worth in computing/programing.

I went through one of the national engineering schools of the ENSI group. There are lots of pretty good engineering schools out there in France if you make it high enough in the entrance exams. Feel free to email me at wagic.the.homebrew at gmail if you want to discuss more.

Hi there, thanks a lot for the reply 🙂 I know the ENSI group and some others like the INSA group or UT. I would be glad to discuss with you about that, if your not too busy. I will prepare an email with a few questions if you want to answer it.

Something you learn when you get into IT/Electronics is that on one side, we do this for profit, and on the other side, we do it because it fills some space inside of us that makes us happy. Myself, I’m about to become an engineer, but got interested on electronics as a kid, 6/7 years maybe, as I was in front of a computer at middle school. Long time after that, I had the need to know “how it worked”, that’s how I got into electronics repair business.

Nice story you shared… thanks for the memories it takes from deep on my box.

What A sweet love story. Next time try having a conversation about why his company has been stealing other devs emulation coding but not putting it to use. Well it was only put to use for these ps4 remaster games and some of the ps2 classics for the ps3. Overall i pity sony in general for the way they handle small groups or companies with litigation tactics.

This is so cool Wololo, having a chance to talk to a Sony engineer and talk about games and other fun stuff and of course knowing any secret project or a next gen game to be released from Sony. It must be cloud 9.lol

If your distant friend can easily guess about your online identity, who knows how much “big brother” know about you. If I were you, I’ll start packing and keep a copy of entire wololo site in a USB stick.. xD XD

Don’t let it bother you, what he said is true. Sony and any other companies does in fact search the web for possible exploits and hacks. It not only shows them what they should be acting against but show them some aspects that they lacked or implemented that doesn’t work for us. One good example is making the memory card require CMA/PS3 just so you can back-up files and saves.

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